Fast Five for Friday: Holiday Tech Favorites, Virtual Assistants, and Finding Your Tribe

0:01 Welcome to The Coaching Equation, brought to you by Empire Partners and hosted by Ryan Lang and Brooke Bishop. Our mission is to help you build a profitable and impactful coaching business by cutting through the noise and all the expert advice to deliver tried and true, actionable insights that you can deploy in your business today. Each week, we bring on expert guests, unveil cutting-edge tactics and strategies, and share the secrets and stories that we've gathered from working with the most successful coaching companies on earth. Welcome back to the Coaching Equation Podcast. I'm your host, Ryan Lang, CEO and co-founder of Empire Partners, alongside my co-founder and co-host, Brooke Bishop.

0:46 Yo, dude. Bit fire. Friday, fast five. Fast Friday, how did the Fs go? Fast five for Friday. Easy for you to say, my friend. Yes, let's get into it. We don't have any time to waste. Today, just as a little pre-frame for today, we're going to go through five things that we love that you can gift yourself or ask the people in your life for during this holiday season. Let's go. Number one. All right. Number one. So, I've got some of the hippy-dippy things. So, these are actually items that my wife got me for my desk space and they've just been game changers. So, one is an earthing mat. So, earthing mat, if you go to earthing.com.

1:26 So, think walking barefoot sleeping under the stars in a sleeping bag, reconnecting to the earth. These things are really cool. They plug into the negative plug in your outlet. And it's the equivalent of when your hands are on it or your feet are on it. It's the same as being outside on the earth and recharging and reducing all the negative energy that comes off your computer system and all the electronical components. Super cool. The other thing is shungite. So the stone shungite, my wife's super into crystals. She's kind of woo. Soon tight. Yeah. Her name is Rainbow. So yes, her parents were hippies. So I've got Shungite stones that also help reduce the EMF and all the electrical shenanigans. I won't go all the tech stuff of what that is.

2:07 And then the third piece that's super cool. So the first one is earthing mat. Second one was Shungite. And the third is a free, so everyone can gift this to themselves. It's a free download called Flux. No, I didn't just use a swear word. F-L-U-X. It mirrors the amount of blue light that comes off of your monitors to the amount of blue light that's outside coming off of the sun. So early in the morning, during the middle of the day, if you're working into the evening, it'll just help mellow out the amount of negative effects the monitors will have on your eyeballs and the eyestrain. So there, I just took up our whole time. Number one, you go. Dude, I'm just, you are way fancier than me.

2:48 I'm just going to say, like, I got to level up my game. All right. So number two is a virtual assistant and or an executive assistant. Here's the deal, you guys. This year, especially, our virtual assistants and our executive assistant, Carrie, big love, Carrie, love you. Ralph, Virg, love you guys too. Look, this is one of the greatest gifts that we got for ourselves this year. And what's funny about it is it's one of those gifts. You know, like when you go to the store and you see something and you're like, really want this, but I don't know if I should, you know, and you like go back and forth and you hum, you know, whatever. Yeah, we did that for a while.

3:29 And we finally landed the fucking plane on this deal and got these amazing humans inside of our ecosystem. They have changed absolutely everything for us. This is truly a gift that keeps on giving. And, Brooke, if somebody wants a virtual assistant, tell them where they can go to get hooked up to inquire about our virtual assistant service. Coachingassistance.com. So, coachingassistance.com. You can learn more about it. And for some reason, when you said off the shelf, I just, I pictured Carrie, was it Backstreet Boys or NSYNC? Where they were in the, like, Barbie cases on the shelf? Oh, yeah. It was one of them. It was NSYNC maybe? It was one of them. I think it was NSYNC. I think you're right. But yeah, anyways, I don't know why I just saw Carrie in like this thing on the shelf when, yeah.

4:13 Nobody puts Carrie on a shelf. All right. Number three. Number three, more techie, cool stuff. So this is a combo. Yeah. So one piece hardware, one piece software. So the hardware is called Stream Deck. Stream Deck. Dude, it's just freaking cool. They're basically hotkeys. So you can pre-program buttons and knobs that can sit right on your desktop. And so if there's certain things that you're always trying to find, like how do I launch my Zoom and where the heck is that thing? Or how do I close my Zoom? You can just quickly hit a button and it's preset. It's super easy to use and it has literally infinite ways that you can set it up. Also, if you do like any of your own video editing, you can make the knob so that you can just do really cool, quick stuff.

4:55 That's like, Hey, here's how I shorten this thing, or here's how I edit and crop it. Makes it really easy for anyone who's multitasking. The software piece that buttons into that bad boy. That's really cool. It's called E cam E C A M M as in Mary. So E cam, you can preset all of your colors for your video. Like you're like right now, I don't know if anyone's seeing the video piece of this, but all the colors or the lighting, or if you want animations or you want to do cool stuff, you can set it all up in there. And it's again, really, really easy to use. You don't have to have an engineer's degree in editing to set it up. And it natively hooks straight into Ecamm. So you can automatically hit a button and poof, like animations happen on your screen.

5:36 Or poof, you can put a border around your image for your Zoom calls. So it's just a really cool combination. Saves me a crap ton of time because it's all preset and it's like, voila, our Zoom's All systems go. I love this. And these are both great tools. And Brooke gifted me a stream deck for my birthday. Yeah, yeah. My amazing partner. And one of the things that... Gotta hook that sucker up. Yeah. One of the things I'm most excited about is during the holidays is a little bit of downtime to kind of reset some of the tech stuff and some of the environment. So I'm looking forward to digging in on that. Yeah. Thank you for that. Operation upgrade. Yes, sir, buddy. All right. So speaking of operation upgrade, number four, one of my favorite software platforms of the year, Spiffy.

6:20 We shifted all of our checkout process over to Spiffy checkouts, and it's been a massive game changer. My buddy, Michael Hunter is an amazing human being, and he's built, he and his team have built an absolutely outstanding checkout process. The cool thing that I love about Spiffy is that it's super simple. It's very streamlined. And one of my favorite parts is that it gives me very, very clear snapshots of our monthly recurring revenue, how many different subscriptions we have, what our churn rate looks like. And it's right there on my dashboard. It integrates really, really easily with a lot of the other platforms that we use, including GoHighLevel. It integrates natively with GoHighLevel, which I really love.

7:02 I didn't actually know that. Yep. It's very exciting. Vanessa is a huge fan of Steady. She is a convert as well. So highly, highly, highly recommend if you are doing any kind of online checkouts, this is a huge upgrade from just having things processed directly through Stripe or something like that. And I much prefer it having used both. I much prefer to some of the more mainstream quote unquote mainstream checkout processes. Just to stack on that, and this is just such a huge one. In the world today, they're just, everyone is demanding more certainty and security, especially as it relates to carts and checkout process. So even if they haven't purchased, if they're just scoping you out on your website, they'll go check out your cart just to see, you know, are you legit?

7:46 Are you, you know, are you somewhere in the middle of nowhere, just stealing people's money, drinking Mai Tais on a beach somewhere? So yeah, Spiffy's awesome. The owner is dope. I know. Dude, next year, it's a new year. We can set new goals, buddy. Yeah. Okay. So we can, by the way, guys, next year we'll be stealing money and on a beach and Mai Tai coaching. Okay. Maybe the Mai Tai part in the beach, but we'll maybe not be the money stealing. Okay. But anyway, yes, Spiffy, you will absolutely love it. And it's one of our favorite tech stack additions this year. If you want to check Spiffy out, in fact, go to empirepartners.io forward slash Spiffy and you can see all about it. How do you spell Spiffy? Is it S-P-I-F-F-Y?

8:27 Is that S-P-I-F-F-Y? Yep. So empirepartners.io forward slash Spiffy, S-P-I-F-F-Y. And lastly, to round us out for today, my good man, one thing that I want to encourage you guys to get something that we have in multiple ways, actually, between the two of us and as a company is community. We have had the good fortune to number one, be part of other people's and other companies communities, plural this year, because we do have coaches, we do have masterminds that we are a part of as well. And that has been amazing. And it's also been amazing to watch how our own internal community has grown.

9:09 And the way that the power is, this was especially palpable at our recent event, the power of having people alongside you that are really running in the same direction and are of a similar mindset, et cetera. It's insanely powerful. And if you don't have one right now, I wanna encourage you to go gift yourself the right community. And if you wanna be a part, if you're interested in being a part of our community, just send me a note. Send me a note at support at empirepartners.io and just put community in the subject line if you want to learn more about Profitable Coach Collective, which is our community. And if it's not this one, please join another one because community is really important and you're going to go farther faster.

9:54 So with that, my friend, we are out of time. This has been the holiday edition of Fast Five for Friday. Brooke, we'll see you on the next one, buddy. Happy holidays. Sounds good. Take care, bud. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Coaching Equation. Please hit subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts. And if you got value out of this episode, we would be so grateful if you would share it out with a friend and leave us a review on iTunes or your favorite platform. To learn more about Empire Partners or to inquire about working with Ryan and Brooke, please visit www.empirepartners.io forward slash go.